Halloween

We don't get many Trick or Treaters here, which is sad, except that means I get to eat  the chocolate I had bought for them.  Mac always carves Jack O'Lanterns and this year he did a traditional one and then did one based on a picture I'd seen on Pinterest, it's all full of holes.

Hurricane Sandy

At first the prediction was that Sandy would stay out in the ocean, then they predicted she'd weaken and perhaps touch along the northern part of the US.
Well she missed us completely, one cloudy day and some wind that's all.  But unfortunately she's going to hit the mid-Atlantic states, affecting people from North Carolina to Massachusetts.  And right in the middle of that is Maryland where our daughter is.
Her job is having people stay at home and work from there for the next 2 days and that's good.
Talked to her on the phone earlier, she says it's very rainy, very windy, but she still has electricity.  She's stocked up on supplies, phone is charged, has batteries, non-perishable food, gallons of water  and is as prepared as she can be.  She doesn't seem to be overly concerned.
I'll worry till the darn thing is completely gone, and probably drive her crazy phoning and tweeting.

Just a quick note, it's Tuesday afternoon and daughter came through fine.

Fussy Eater

I'd be the first person to admit that I'm a fussy eater.  The list of things I won't eat could fill a small city telephone book.  I won't eat:

snails

tuna casserole

mussels

clams

oysters, except when they're fried

boiled chicken

anything with coconut

most things cooked with cheese

anything cooked with a white sauce

most fish, unless they don't taste like a fish

most organ meat

macaroni and cheese

anything with cilantro in it or its Asian cousin coriander

anything cooked with curry

most Chinese and Japanese food

The list goes on forever, but the food that deserves a special category  of dislike is liver.  I more than hate liver, I hate how it looks, both cooked and raw, I hate its smell, I hate its texture.
There are a number of things that Mac likes to eat that I'll fix (think Chinese food), but I refuse to cook liver.
My Mother was always a stickler for making us eat whatever we were given to eat (we were rather poor and food could not be wasted) and we couldn't leave the table until  our plate was clear.  One time when I was about 5 we had liver, cooked to the consistency of shoe leather.  I choked down a bite or two, but my stomach rebelled, so I sat there long after the rest of the family had left the table, I knew I could eat no more.  I looked around the kitchen and realized I could hide the rest of it under the stove and refrigerator, so that's what I did.
My Mom cleaned the kitchen when I was through and swept under the stove and refrigerator and of course she found the liver.  I was punished, but she no longer made me eat when I didn't like.  Instead she said that I didn't have the eat what I didn't like, but there would be no more food until the next meal.
I could, and did, live with that.  I'd much rather miss a meal than eat something I don't like.
When our daughter came along we never made her eat anything she didn't want to, but we did ask her to taste everything.  Now she's the most adventurous eater I know.
Have I gotten better as I've gotten older?  A bit, I now eat rice (which I would never eat), shrimp, crab,
mushrooms and other (to me) exotic foods.

Are You a Barometer?

The weather forecasters are saying we'll probably not going to get any rain from Hurricane Sandy, but my right knee is telling me we probably will.
Now my right knee, lower back and left elbow all forecast rain at one time or another, but my right knee is the most accurate.
For years people have said they know when it's going to rain because their joints ache.  Scientists who have studied the phenomenon now say there is some validity to this, but that the actual culprit is not the rain or humidity, but changes in atmospheric pressure.
So I guess my knee is not a rain gauge, but rather a barometer, though it swears it's going to rain today.

No Wonder We Get Lost

You often hear of folks getting lost, walking in circles, even when they were not too far from where they wanted to go.  MythBusters did a program on this and it was fascinating.  They put themselves in a wide open field, put a blindfold on them and all they had to do was walk to the top of the field.  Turns out they not only couldn't do it, they didn't even get close, they just kept walking in tighter and tighter circles.
Research at the Max Planck Institute explains why.

Wide-open spaces

We walk in circles when we traverse terrain devoid of landmarks, such as the desert. Even though we'd swear we're walking in a straight line, we actually curve around in loops as tight as 66 feet in diameter. German research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics reveals why: With every step a walker takes, a small deviation arises in the brain's balance (vestibular) or body awareness (proprioceptive) systems. These deviations accumulate to send that individual veering around in ever-tighter circles. But they don't occur when we can recalibrate our sense of direction using a nearby building or mountain, for instance.

I've got to be honest, that even with landmarks some folks have trouble walking in a straight line, maybe they just don't recognize the landmark.  I know that I have a much better since of direction than Mac and our daughter says she has no sense of direction at all.

The Secret Keeper

I have been a fan of Kate Morton since reading her first book.  I loved them all---The House at Riverton, The Distant Hours  and The Secret Garden.  When Amazon notified me that she had a new one coming out on October 16 I pre-ordered it and couldn't wait for it to get here.
I read it in 2 days, all 496  pages of it and I have to say that I liked it, but I didn't love it like I did her earlier books.  Not sure why, perhaps it was the two main characters telling the story, Dorothy (Dolly) and her daughter Laurel.  I didn't like either one of them.  By the end I had figured things out and it explained one of the mysteries that had been  bothering me, do people change?
The story begin when Dorothy is very old lady waiting to die and her daughter Laurel who is struggling with the memory of having seen her mother kill a man years ago.     At 16 all she wanted to do was to protect her mother, now she wants, before it's too late, to know the real reason her mother had  killed the man.

The rest of the story is done in flashbacks, beginning when Dorothy was a rebellious teenager in the 30's and the events that changed her life.
If you liked her earlier books you'll probably like this one too.

New Paintings

Through the years Mac has done a number of animal paintings and I always claim the best of them to hang them where I can see them each day.  I still love the Spaniel, I mean, just look at those eyes, how could you not love him.  And the fox still brings a smile to my face.
A week or two ago when he was looking for something to paint I asked him to do a bear, I love bears, they're all over the house, but there are no bear paintings.
So we searched on the internet for bear picture, I picked out 2 that I really liked and he painted them for me.  The first is a bear cub hanging on a tree, he is so sweet.  But the one that touches my heart is the Mama Bear with SIX cubs.  Normally bears  have 2 cubs at a time, occasionally 3, but 6 is almost unheard of.  Somewhere though it happened and someone took a picture of them.  Now they're a painting waiting to be framed and put on my wall.  I think they're wonderful.

Still So Sweet

Pansies!!!

I'm a Messy Potter

I've been potting Pansies, and as Wodehouse would tell you, that's a much better Sunday morning activity than potting a gnu!
Love Pansies and Violas.  They do really well here and will keep on blooming until the heat of next summer wears them out.

Banana Bread Thoughts

While making a loaf of banana bread this morning my thoughts turned to "Dancing With the Stars".  A favorite show of mine you ask, oh dear Lord NO !  I can't imagine anything more boring than watching a bunch of D list stars (Pamela Anderson), non-celebraties (Bristol Palin) and exjocks dancing.  I'm not into rhinestone and feathers so their costumes do nothing for me, hearing them talk is about as interesting as watching paint dry and their silly dances are what you use to see on Arthur Murray a 100 years ago only sexier, if you consider that sexy.
Yet it is one of the most popular shows on tv.  My sister insists I watch it, everyone I know watches it and spends the next day talking about it.  I don't get it.
When we go out dancing I see other people dancing, some good, some not so good, but pretty interesting anyway.

Well, finally, an explanation of why I can't remember things.  An explanation that doesn't blame me. My daughter had this on Twitter.
Check out what Reader's Digest has to say about Doors.

Doors

Ever walk into a room with some purpose in mind, only to completely forget what that purpose was? Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses. Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an event boundary in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale.

So all we have to do is:

Stay in one room

Remove all the doorways in our house.

Live outside

Or realize if the doorway didn't make us forget something else would have.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like ....

NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!!!!

No, no, no  it's not, and Target to the contrary it is not Christmas time.  Running your ads this early will not entice me to shop at your store, it will only make me angry.  I saw their first ad before Columbus Day, that's not funny!
So I don't want to see any Christmas ads, but that doesn't mean that I haven't started making a few things.  I've had these pieces of material laying around for a while and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them, but they were just so luscious I had to have them.